4 Uses of Lean Six Sigma for HR Management Professionals

​Lean and Six Sigma were originally two different business philosophies and management tools used to optimize processes. Today most companies combine the two for great value addition.
Lean is a concept that believes in generating most value for the customers using the least amount of resources. 

It is the best strategy to reduce wastefulness in a process. Lean is often confused with making employees work faster or requiring them to take fewer breaks, but that can’t be further from the truth. It is supposed to free employees of unnecessary tasks and pinpoint their efforts towards critical activities that create the most value for customers. ​

While Lean, in general, is about making processes simpler, Six Sigma focuses on the quality of what you deliver. Six Sigma’s strategy is based on an important insight; it aims to make every product the best version of itself by reducing variation.
If you look at their history, the two techniques were invented by large-scale manufacturers to improve their production processes. With time, professionals in non-manufacturing industries adapted these concepts too.
Today, we look at how you, as an HR Management Professional, can apply Lean Six Sigma in your work processes.

Re-Definition of HR’s Role ​

Lean Six Sigma is a tool that challenges the status quo in Management. The thought process involved in Lean Six Sigma gives an HR professional room to evaluate how current systems add value to their role. If there are any procedures that hold back employees, waste their time, or reduce the quality of their output, they can be reviewed and pushed out of the system.

​This is a paradigm shift in the role of Human Resources. Lean Six Sigma redefines HR as a body which connects the employees to their customers.

​New Hiring Processes

​Hiring procedures for a new employee are inundated with all kinds of paperwork. Several questionnaires have to be filled and forms signed. And since such paperwork is often a legal requirement, it can’t be ignored. However, recognizing that such processes can be moved online has made the life of Human Resource employees a lot easier. Files can be maintained on online portals rather than stacked in physical filing cabinets. This has also allowed reduction in costs by making the environment paperless.

​Performance Measurement

It is important for an HR Professional to be able to assess the performances of individual employees, but also how the overall system performs. If there are any gaps in the value creation process of the business, you would have to move in and fulfill it either by creating a new job or delegating it to a current employee.

​Lean Six Sigma helps in evaluating the gaps that exist in operations. And since it relies on use of data to ascertain these gaps, you can establish a close value of the correlation between performance gaps and their business implications.

​Compensation Process

​Depending on the size of your business or the number of employees that you have in the company, different forms of compensation processes can be utilized. What is important here is to make sure that the compensation is delivered on time, since late disbursement of salaries can negatively impact employee motivation. Important questions that can be asked to evaluate the compensation cycle are: Can the process be moved to an online portal? Is too much time being wasted on individual outstanding cases? Are new-hires being moved into the compensation system effectively?

Using Lean Six Sigma for Human Resource can help bring new insights to their processes. If you wish to learn more about the system of Lean Six Sigma, check out LearningManager Lean Six Sigma :)